In my work I am interested exploring the intersection between painting and sculpture, art and design, the hand-made and the mass-produced. I am excited by the tension that arises from situating my work in between these categories. I would like my paintings to create moments of unexpected discovery within a language of reconstructable forms.

I fondly remember working with my dad in his wood shop as a young child. Cutting the parts and assembling the pieces into a bench or a table revealed to me a magical journey from a slab of wood to a finished product. More importantly, I experienced the joy and endless possibilities of making things by hand.

In 1980, when I was twelve years old, my parents took me to see the Picasso retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. I was deeply moved by Picasso’s unique vision and specifically how he constructed his paintings out of a distinct visual language of individual passages or parts. That was the moment when I decided to become an artist.

As a painting student at Rhode Island School of Design, I gravitated toward American abstract art from the 1960s. The honesty and clarity of this work demonstrated that what is left out can be as important as what is included. Interestingly, I began to look at sculpture and painting from this period as one in the same. Later, Matisse’s cut-out collages revealed to me that cutting material was another way to draw, which opened up further opportunities to combine painting and sculpture.

For much of my career, I have been exploring materials that stand outside traditional art making and address ideas of interchangeability and mass production. Early on, I created a series of sculptural paintings using common plastic drinking straws and a blowtorch. More recently, I have been utilizing automotive paint and wood, often adopting the manufacturers’ color names as the titles of my works. Yet by cutting the boards by hand, like Matisse with his scissors, I create subtle variations in line that betray the unique hand of the artist. In this way, I am repurposing commercial systems for singular modes of expression.

— Andrew Zimmerman

Andrew Zimmerman's work is governed by a process he invents, and re-invents, to create painted marks and assembled constructions. Each body of work often looks distinct from the previous collection, but the underlying pursuit is consistent — to discover and develop a process for making new forms.